25 March 2011

Ongoing fascination

I saw a girl my age on the métro today reading another one of Guibert's books, À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie. This one is about how a friend of his promised that he would take him to the U.S. to find a cure for AIDS, that he could save his life. It's all so very tragic. I'm still reading his journal, and in a weird way I feel mentally and artistically closer to this person than I've felt towards anyone in a very long time. 

And now the similarities:

1.) We both think la galette du roi (taste: THIS) is the most delicious dessert we've ever eaten.
2.) We have both taken photographs of our respective stuffed animals tucked into our beds. He had a lamb that he named (though I can't for the life of me find the passage); I have a lion named Mr. Lion / Monsieur Le Lion.
3.) We both read Crime and Punishment and freaked out over the fact that we hesitantly/ mildly identify with Raskolnikov. We adore Dostoyevsky.
4.) We both write in our journals about strange dream sequences and people we see while out walking around, on the métro. He wrote a passage once about sitting across from a young girl on the train who was knitting. She had green eyes. I fancy this was me in my previous life, and perhaps that's why I feel so strangely connected to him. Maybe we've met and we never knew it. Wouldn't that be neat.

Here's a photo from photographer Billy Maynard. He's from New Zealand and seems pretty sharp for a 19 year old. This photograph screams Guibert to me.

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